


The Christmas War

by nowforruin



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Captain Swan - Freeform, Christmas fic, F/M, Modern AU, One Shot, Tumblr Prompt, all the Christmas pranks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21699049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowforruin/pseuds/nowforruin
Summary: When Emma finds herself in a Christmas prank competition with Killian Jones, she never really knows what to expect next. But as Christmas draws closer and their battle escalates, he just might be the gift she never knew to ask for.
Relationships: Captain Hook | Killian Jones/Emma Swan
Comments: 39
Kudos: 169





	The Christmas War

“What the hell.” Emma stopped three feet away from her desk, glancing around the office. “Who did this?”

Across the aisle, Ruby chuckled, her bright red lips stretched into a wide grin. “It was like that when I came in. It’s kind of cute, isn’t it? Breaks up the empty coffee cups nicely.”

“Cute.” Emma repeated the single word as though it was a curse, glaring at her desk. Christmas confetti had thrown up all over it, shiny little green trees and bright red mini present boxes gleaming in the fluorescent lights. Someone had tied an enormous red bow on the back of her chair. “It’s going to take forever to clean up all the confetti!”

“Oh, come now, Swan. Your desk is already a rubbish bin. You’ll hardly notice.” Killian Jones grinned at her from behind his own desk, the surface pristine as usual. If not for his open laptop and steaming mug of coffee, the workspace looked completely unoccupied. “I think it’s festive.”

“Festive,” she repeated, narrowing her eyes. There was something about the way he was watching her, anticipation and amusement alive in the brilliant blue of his stare. She scooped up a handful of the confetti, offering him the same smile she usually reserved for arrogant perps right before she clapped them in handcuffs. “I think your desk could use a little Christmas too, Jones.”

“You wouldn’t.” He didn’t so much as bother getting up from his chair, raising one brow at her in a mocking dare.

Emma let her smile fall, sighing as she held her hand over the trash bin. At the last moment, she spun, throwing her hand up as her fingers uncurled. Tiny Christmas trees and present boxes and candy canes flew through the air, raining down all over Killian Jones, his desk, and unless she was very much mistaken, into his coffee.

There was a beat of silence in the office. Killian went still, staring at her as though she had grown elf ears. “Bad form, Swan,” he finally said. His voice was low, a rumble that skittered across her skin in ways she wished it wouldn’t. The effect should have been ruined by the plastic candy cane clinging to his eyelashes, but somehow, covered in Christmas confetti, he was more attractive than ever. “Very bad form.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Emma said slowly, widening her eyes with innocence and letting a smile curl her lips. “I think you look…” She glanced back over her shoulder at Ruby, who was shaking with the effort of containing her laughter. “Ruby, what word could possibly describe this? Starts with an F…”

“I think the word you’re looking for is _festive_ ,” Ruby supplied as Emma turned back to face Killian.

“Yes,” Emma agreed, nodding her head. “That is the word. Festive. How very _festive_ you are, Jones.”

He scowled at her, then his coffee, then her again. “There is confetti in my coffee. You don’t trifle with a man’s coffee.”

“I’m so very sorry,” Emma lied, shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t know what happened. I meant to throw it out and I just… slipped.”

Killian got to his feet slowly, unfurling his lean frame from the desk chair. He was probably doing his best to look menacing, but the trickle of confetti over his torso ruined the effect. Pieces of it stuck to his clothing, almost as if his snug black sweater had suddenly sprouted holiday sequins. “I find my coffee in need of refreshing.”

Ruby was shaking her head when Emma turned around, pleased with herself. Killian Jones had been a pain in her ass as long as he’d been working there. He never missed an opportunity to quip at her expense, or mock the organized chaos of her desk. It had been far too long since she had landed any sort of retaliation that so thoroughly hit the mark. The memory of that stupid confetti in his hair would keep her laughing for weeks.

“You realize this means war, right?”

Emma shrugged, dropping back into her desk chair. She reached behind her back, tearing the bow off and stuffing it into the trash. “I’m not worried. What’s he going to do?”

❖

Emma nearly dropped her coffee when she came into the station a week later and saw her desk. After the confetti incident, she had expected Jones to do something. More confetti, a bigger bow, maybe some tinsel. Tinsel was always a pain in the ass to clean up.

“How do you like your gift?” he asked from her back, so close she could smell the spice of his cologne. It was truly unfair that a man who irritated her so much looked and smelled the way this one did.

He had wrapped her desk. Her entire freaking desk. It was all covered in four different kinds of Christmas wrapping paper, each more garish than the last. And not just the desk. Everything on it too. She could make out the shape of her computer monitor, the keyboard, the phone. It must have taken forever.

“I’m going to murder you,” she said without turning around. “Slowly.”

“Now, now. Murdering a police officer is a serious offense, Swan.” He stepped closer, his breath warm on her cheek. “I wouldn’t want to have to use my handcuffs.”

It should have been a ridiculous statement, but the way he said it, in a low rumble full of indecent promise, every nerve in Emma’s body woke up. She swallowed hard, banishing her unhelpful hormones. There was _nothing_ sexy about Killian threatening to use his handcuffs on her. She didn’t even like the man.

“You would have to catch me first.” She intended to snap at him, but to her dismay, her tone matched his. Something sultry and inviting emerged, and she felt him shift at her back, his body moving infinitesimally closer in response to her unintentional invitation.

Indecision swelled. It would be so easy to turn around, to look in his eyes and see what, precisely, he meant by all of this. He liked to bust her balls – that was nothing new – but he was invested in this little Christmas prank for some reason.

Invested in _her_.

A burst of laughter broke the tension, and Emma quickly stepped forward, whipping around to find Ruby doubled over, clutching her stomach. “Oh my god,” she gasped, pointing at Emma’s desk with one bright red nail. “That’s… that’s genius.”

“Genius is not the word I would use.” Emma rolled her eyes, catching a flicker of emotion in Killian’s eyes she didn’t want to name before he broke into a mocking grin.

“I think genius is the perfect word,” he teased, giving her desk a pointed look. “Listen Swan, when you think about it, I’ve done you a favor. In all the time we’ve worked together, your desk has never looked so tidy.”

“Tidy.”

“Aye, it’s a word one uses for when things are where they ought to be.”

Emma stomped over to her desk and began tearing at the wrapping paper, muttering under her breath. He would pay for this. The trick was that she wasn’t prone to pranks. There had never really been room in her life for that sort of thing. Everything had been serious, because everything she did always had something riding on it. Something important.

And up until the last year or two, spending even five dollars on wrapping paper at the dollar store just to irritate a coworker would have been unthinkable.

Killian chuckled on his way to his desk, and when she looked up, he was watching her with a self-satisfied smirk, his eyes alight with merriment.

“Go ahead and smile, Jones,” she called, tearing off another chunk of the paper. “Just remember I catch criminals for a living.”

The bastard’s smile only widened.

❖

“Aren’t you early,” Ruby drawled as Emma hurried into the station two days later.

“I have some paperwork to catch up on.”

“Uh huh.” Ruby glanced at Killian’s desk, curling her fingers around her coffee mug and leaning over her desk with a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes. “What did you do?”

“Who says I did anything?”

“You’re here an hour early.”

“I have paper—“

“You’ve never been an hour early. Not once. What are you planning?”

Emma sighed, barely containing her grin as she glanced over at Killian’s desk. “You’ll see.” She slid into her seat, carefully maneuvering her feet around the plastic bin tucked beneath her desk. The bin contained the contents of Killian’s desk, with absolutely no effort made to keep it organized. She had padded the fragile things of course — with a heavily glittered garland that was sure to leave sparkly bits of itself all over, well, everything.

“But—“

“Wait,” Emma repeated, narrowing her eyes at the other woman. “Don’t ruin this for me. It took forever to come up with.”

They waited.

At precisely 8:29am, Killian Jones walked through the door, the picture of winter cheer. His pale cheeks were flushed from his walk, a red and green plaid scarf curled around his neck. Snowflakes dotted his dark hair, and when he grinned in greeting, Emma automatically smiled back.

Her eyes flicking from Emma, to Killian, to Killian’s desk and back again, Ruby didn’t so much as pretend to be doing anything other than waiting.

“You simply cannot help yourself, can you, Swan?” Killian asked as he made his way toward his desk, glancing down at Emma’s. Bits of tape and small scraps of wrapping paper she had missed clung here and there, a haphazard stack of paper leaning precariously on the edge of one corner. A smattering of mostly empty coffee cups sat between the papers, along with the onion rings she had never finished from yesterday’s lunch.

“Worry about your own desk,” she told him, reaching for one of the cold onion rings and popping it in her mouth just to irritate him. He scowled at her, hugging his coffee mug closer as if to protect it from her.

She forced herself not to watch his every step, but once he sat down and began to open the drawer where he usually stored his laptop overnight, she turned expectedly toward him. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ruby do the same.

“What the bloody hell…” Killian jerked open the top drawer, the crinkle of plastic shortly followed by the clatter of candy as it fell to the floor.

Maybe she had stuffed that drawer just a little too much.

He opened another drawer. More candy canes. He opened another. Even more candy canes.

Emma couldn’t help herself. She was choking with laughter halfway through it, his face too comical to contain her glee. She had rarely seen Killian without some clever thing to say, but with his brows furrowed, he simply gaped at her.

“This is _very_ bad form, Swan,” he told her, a flicker of irritation in his words as he swept his hand over his desk. “Where is my bloody laptop?”

“You mean it’s not in your desk?” She fluttered her eyelashes at him, adopting what she supposed to be a look of innocence. “Is there a problem with your desk? You seem…flustered.”

His eyes narrowed. “Dangerous game you’re playing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She leaned back, catching the bin under her desk with the heel of her boot and dragging it out. “Oh, what’s this?”

“Swan…”

She laughed, giving the box a good shove with her foot so that it slid across the floor toward him. “Don’t worry. Your stuff is safe.” She paused, glancing across her desk to Ruby. “It’s just…festive.”

❖

Emma thought, somehow, that maybe her trick with the candy canes and glittered garland would put an end to the Christmas pranks.

She was wrong. Very, very wrong.

The morning after the candy canes, she came in to find every single one of the keys pulled off her keyboard and replaced with mini, stick on bows in green, red, silver, and gold. (Though she did have a little laugh to herself about the flecks of glitter that stuck to some of the bows. Killian would be covered in glitter for a long, long time from her prank.)

She bought Killian a peace offering of those Ferrara Roche chocolates. She even tied a fancy red ribbon around the golden box. Of course, she didn’t tell him that she had carefully unwrapped every single chocolate and replaced it within the box with Brussels sprouts.

He changed all her Spotify playlists to Christmas songs when she went to pick up lunch. Suddenly her carefully curated mix of songs was nothing but high-pitched holiday cheer.

So she dumped out the contents of his bag of coffee in the fridge and refilled it with crushed peppermint Oreos.

“Swan!”

Emma grinned to herself, not acknowledging his shout from within the small break room. They were the last two left in the station, and really, she had assumed he would find his replacement “coffee” in the morning, a final prank for Christmas Eve. It was awfully late for him to be brewing more now.

But since she had spent her lunch break surreptitiously crushing Oreos while he was out on a call for a broken-into car, she was lucky enough to still be finishing up her own report — Leroy had caused a scene at the bar again — when he found her latest prank.

“This is…” He glared down at her, evidently having decided shouting from the break room would not do. With a scowl, he held out the coffee bag, shaking it under her nose. The pleasant aroma of chocolate wafted from it. “This is an abomination.”

She smiled sweetly, licking her finger and sticking it into the bag so the cookie crumbs would stick. Looking up at his wide eyes, she popped her finger into her mouth. “I think it’s delicious,” she told him, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “What’ve you got against chocolate, Jones?”

He stared at her, his blue eyes full of sparks — and something else. His gaze dropped to her mouth, lingering there a beat too long.

“Killian?”

He took a step back, as though her voice had been a slap, jerking his chin up as he looked her in the eye again. “I quite like chocolate,” he said with a grin, but his mask had slipped. “Just not where my bloody coffee ought to be.”

“Why are you even making coffee? It’s late.”

“Aye, but I don’t sleep much, so it doesn’t particularly matter.”

“Me too,” Emma said quietly, something about his tone tugging the words out of her. She opened her top drawer, pulling out the ziplock bag she had poured his coffee into. She might not still live in her car, but she abhorred wasting money — her own or someone else’s.

He reached for the coffee, that odd look back in his eyes. When he took it, there wasn’t an accidental brush of their fingers so much as he lingered, letting his skin rub against hers. Emma didn’t say anything, too surprised to yank her hand back. Sure, he teased her relentlessly, but he had never meant anything by his flirting.

Had he?

Killian took his coffee and disappeared back into the break room with a mumbled _thanks_. She watched him go, puzzled by his quietness. The man had been many things in the time they had worked together, but he was rarely quiet.

He did fill out a pair of black jeans rather nicely.

Emma scowled at herself, dropping her eyes back to the form on her desk. She hardly saw the point in filing these incident reports. Her handwriting was barely legible even to herself, never mind anyone else. It wasn’t as though someone was going to read this so much as stick it into Leroy’s (very thick) records folder. She sighed, grabbing her pen to finish up.

“Emma?”

She looked up, following the tentative sound of her name to where Killian stood in the doorway to the break room, his hip propped against the frame. There was something nervous about him, his usual bravado nowhere in sight. “Forget something?” she asked, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms over her chest. There was something uncomfortable about the way he was looking at her, something that made her want to hide herself away. Not because he was being creepy, but because when he looked at her like that, she wondered just how much she was really hiding.

He scratched behind his ear, glancing back over his shoulder into the break room. “It was rude of me not to ask. Would you like a coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Great.”

Emma stared at the empty spot where Killian had been for a breath too long, her brows drawing together with puzzlement. There was definitely something off. She glanced down at her report, then tossed her pen onto the desk with a sigh. It would keep.

Killian stood at the counter, pouring steaming coffee into two mugs. She knew he drank his black, but the sugar and cream were already out, waiting for her. He had cleaned up too, the dishes she and Ruby had used earlier that she had forgotten about sitting neatly in the drying rack. David’s coat was no longer tossed on the small sofa, but instead hanging neatly on the hook by the door. Someone had hung a cheerful ball of greenery above the couch, while white Christmas lights rimmed the two windows.

“You decorated.”

“Aye.” He offered a somewhat sheepish grin, sliding her coffee across the counter. “Found a use for those bloody candy canes too,” he added, pointing to a bright red bowl overflowing with the candy.

“We’ll be eating them until next Christmas,” she said with a laugh, shaking her head at herself. The cashier at the dollar store had looked at her like she was insane when she had plopped down 20 boxes of the mini-candy canes.

“Hardly. It’s a wonder you still have teeth with the amount of sugar you eat,” he teased, giving her a pointed look as she dumped a heaping spoonful into her coffee.

“Oh please. You forget I took everything out of your desk. Your stash of peanut butter cups says you have no room to judge.” Emma picked up her coffee, impulsively moving toward the couch and tucking her feet beneath herself. “I’m just going to sit here and drink this,” she explained, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

“Marvelous idea.”

The words were right, but his voice was choked. Emma gave him a puzzled look, watching as he looked at her, then the ball of greenery above her head, and then back at her again. He was openly staring at her, a question in his eyes that she hardly knew how to answer.

But then his expression shifted, a determined set to his jaw that matched his long strides as he crossed the room. She protested as he took her coffee, setting it down on the small side table.

“Seriously? Why did you do that?”

He laughed, a low rumble of noise filled with promise. “Look up, Swan,” he said quietly.

She glanced up, still not understanding what the wreath ball had to do with anything, but he was watching her again, like she was something delicious he couldn’t wait to taste. His eyes fell to her mouth, and this time, when he reached for her hand, she couldn’t pretend to herself she didn’t understand exactly what that look meant.

“I don’t get it,” she told him as he pulled her to her feet, his hand warm in hers.

“You sat under the mistletoe.”

“Oh.” Emma looked up again, the innocuous ball of greenery poised about a foot over her head. “Oh!” she repeated, realization suddenly dawning as heat flooded her cheeks. “Why did someone put that over the couch? No one here wants to kiss—“

Killian’s lips pressed against hers, his hand suddenly in her hair drawing her in close. Surprised, Emma kissed him back instinctively, one hand fisting in the fabric of his shirt. He tasted of coffee and peppermint, she thought idly, but then he growled, low in his throat, and Emma lost the ability to think.

It wasn’t the sort of kiss one gave out to just anyone foolish enough to fall for the oldest Christmas trick in the book. Killian kissed her like he had been waiting for a Christmas miracle and she was it. His lips moved over hers, needy, urgent, as though if he paused to so much as breathe, Emma would turn to smoke in his arms.

By the time they finally separated, Emma was breathless. Her heart raced, her blood liquid fire in her veins as she stared up at him. His lips curled into a soft smile, his hand slipping from her hair to cup her jaw, his thumb brushing against her cheek. “Perhaps I should have started with the mistletoe,” he said quietly, laughter in his voice.

She laughed, leaning into his touch. “You put that up just for me?”

“Dave is hardly an appealing prospect, and it’s hardly as though Ruby would be interested.”

“How did you know I was interested?”

“I didn’t,” he replied, his grin widening. “Not until you stuffed my desk full of candy canes.”

“You started this just to see if I _liked_ you?”

“I might have done.” He leaned down, brushing his lips against hers gently. “It seems to have worked.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, but she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face as she glanced up at the mistletoe once more. “Buy me dinner and we’ll see about that.”

Emma was still smiling when she woke up in the morning, Killian’s arm tightening around her naked waist as he pressed a warm, wet kiss to her shoulder. “Merry Christmas, Emma,” he murmured against her skin, his voice rough with sleep and desire as he slid his body over hers.

“Mmm,” she managed to get out, sleepily sliding her arms around his neck. “Where’s my present?”

His laughter brushed against her skin, his breath damp against her cheek. “I believe I’ve already given you a present.” He hesitated briefly, mischief curving his lips into a wicked smile. “Three or four presents, if I recall correctly.”

“I’m greedy. I’d like another.” She stretched, stealing a kiss. “Maybe another after that too.”

She got three.


End file.
